Thomas Steinfeld on the end of cohesion within Europe

The EU has always been a project of desire, a vision that has vanished amidst the reality of the economic crisis, Thomas Steinfeld writes in the left-liberal daily Süddeutsche Zeitung: "Now that Greece and Ireland are being placed under supervision, with entire countries within the EU being reduced to poverty because they will never be able to pay back the loans they have just received, it's as if an economic automatism, a practical necessity, is becoming the subject of the story - an automatism that can no longer be presented in an aesthetic form but will inevitably produce a culture of raging helplessness, of collective and individual revolt. ... The harsher the economic living standards of the weak economies within the European Union become, and the clearer it becomes that only those who can make money will be able to maintain their position as sovereign political subjects within the community, the more all the criticism seems to turn into a struggle in front of closed doors. ... But this state of affairs cannot continue: we must, as philosophy once promised to do, regain a vision of our times."

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